There is no shortage of places to put text on the internet. The right one depends on what you actually need. Below is a fair-minded comparison of Textpad.cloud against the categories of tools people most often weigh it against.
Pastebin clones are great for ephemeral text dumps. They fall apart the moment you want a real editor, image support, or a stable archive. Textpad is what pastebins would have become if they had ten more years of UX iteration.
Medium and Substack are publishing platforms with an audience layer. They are heavy on monetization and discovery, light on quick capture. Textpad is the opposite — it shines when you want a permanent URL fast, without a content strategy meeting.
Notion and Obsidian are knowledge bases. They reward structure: databases, links, tags. Textpad rewards flow: open, write, publish. For the long-tail notes that do not deserve a database row, Textpad is faster and the output is shareable.
SSGs (Hugo, Astro, Eleventy) give you maximum control and zero hosted cost — at the price of a build step, a repo, and a domain to babysit. Textpad gives you 95 percent of the result with none of the babysitting. If you measure cost in minutes of your life, Textpad wins.
Google Docs is a collaboration tool with a publishing afterthought. The URLs are ugly, the formatting is heavy, and nobody really reads a long-form doc inside Drive. Textpad is built for the reader; Docs is built for the editor.
Use the right tool for the right job. Textpad sits in the sweet spot between "a pastebin" and "a blog" — and that gap is wider than people assume.